Hear Royksopp Revive Eighties Groove on ‘Never Ever’

Röyksopp, the Norwegian duo of Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland, aim for peak dance floor euphoria on their new single, "Never Ever." The producers recruited the singer Susanne Sundfør to contribute driving vocals to the track.

Röyksopp used a series of juicy food metaphors to describe their new release on YouTube. "Prepare to digest the latest flavors from the RYXP kitchen; thick slices of pop drenched in heavy keyboard-gravy, seasoned with '80s soul and that signature Röyksopp-sound," the duo wrote. "It's disco baked beyond recognition."

But not too far beyond recognition. Listeners will easily locate the relentless beat, the fluttering synthesizers and the driving vocals from Sundfør. Sundfør has graced several tracks by Röyksopp in the past, including a 2013 cover of Depeche Mode's "Ice Machine" and a pair of songs that appeared on the duo's 2014 album The Inevitable End.

Following the release of that record, Röyksopp announced that they were no longer interested in making full-lengths. "The whole idea of us going away from the whole album concept was that we do have many musical expressions that we want to do," Brundtland notes in a statement. "One of them might be a club track, but we don't necessarily want to do an album of it. It's that way with 'Never Ever' — we love it, but we don't need 12 tracks like it."

"I think we would like to further our exploration into the analog world," Berge added, "like the early years of electronic music, where synths and drum machines would be used in combination with more traditional acoustic and analog instruments. Like we've done in that past, but take it even further."